Other than passwords, there are a host of other tricks, all with that same goal in mind: verifying that you are you. Two of the most common are security questions (silliness) and two-step verification such as Gmail’s, which involves a secondary code that only you have access to.

These, however, are all variations on a theme—logging in, account by account, to the data or service you are trying to access. A new device called the Nymi has a different idea in mind for how to verify your identity, and with it, its creator Bionym prefigures a time where you don’t so much as log in as present yourself.

A promotional video from Bionym shows how this ought to work and imagines a few scenarios beyond your run-of-the-mill email login for which this could be quite handy:

What happens when you exercise or are under stress? The company explains on its site that the Nymi only verifies once—when you put it on. And they recommend you put it on in a relaxed state that you could replicate easily (first thing when you wake up, say). Once it has identified you, it won’t lose track of you until it is removed. When you put it on again, it will need to check you anew. Currently the company is accepting pre-orders which it hopes to ship in early 2014. Whether it works as well in reality as it does in the video will determine whether this becomes a viable option for people concerned about their online security who have many accounts and devices to constantly log in to.

Of course, many of the functions demonstrated in the video will require some programming and possibly even some specialized hardware on the receiving end, but the concept at least gives a sense of another way identity verification could work in an age when machines constantly need to know who you are.